The 7th Guest Remake Review – Old-School Chills, Modern Accessibility

The 7th Guest Remake Review

Full disclosure: I didn’t play The 7th Guest when it was released in 1993. I was a Mac-only kind of gamer back then. Besides, I was already smitten by another CD-ROM puzzle game, a little Mac exclusive called Myst. However, a year or so later, The 7th Guest appeared for Mac and I happily made up for lost time. When the 2023 VR Remake was released, I missed that one, too, so I was excited to take a look at this new flatscreen port.

Port of a Port

The differences between the VR version and the new flatscreen version are minimal, outside of a necessarily different control scheme. Best of all, players who own one of the VR version can snag the flatscreen version for free (and vice versa). You have a far less chance of running into a wall or getting queasy with motion sickness in the flatscreen version. Probably.

However, those differences in controls are where one of the minor issues crop up. Playing the flatscreen version, it’s easy to see that certain puzzles or objects were designed to be manipulated in VR, so there can be a bit of fiddly awkwardness or sketchy camera angles to contend with. Not a deal breaker, but from the start, there’s a feeling that the flatscreen version is very slightly compromised.

The Rise and Fall of FMV

I’m guessing that the statute of limitations on spoilers has probably run out by now, at least on the original 1993 version. You play in first-person as a guest at the mansion of eccentric toy maker Henry Stauf. Six other ghostly guests are in attendance also, and your overall task is to discover why the guests disappeared on a fateful night. As you explore, you solve puzzles which open up new, themed rooms and additional narrative scenes. As the developer stated in a recent interview, “it has the feel of an escape room.” It’s campy but not without some genuine emotional depth and unexpected twists and turns.

Back in 1993, the inclusion of full motion video represented the zenith of cutting-edge game design, thanks to the expanded speed and memory of CD-ROM technology. It didn’t take too many years for FMV to become an eye-rolling cliche. But everything comes back. For the 2023 VR version, all the original game’s video sequences were re-filmed in volumetric video with new actors and a new script. This allowed players to walk around the characters. For the new flatscreen version, those characters have been flattened into 2D characters with a fixed perspective.

In the 1990s, The 7th Guest was described as a horror game, but contemporary audiences expecting gore, jump scares or extreme violence won’t find it. Instead, The 7th Guests invests in weirdness, a creepy atmosphere, mystery, and humor. It’s much closer to Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride than Until Dawn.

So. Many. Puzzles.

If there’s a more puzzle-heavy game than The 7th Guest, I sure haven’t played. What makes the puzzles in The 7th Guest tolerable and mostly fun is that they are not arbitrary complications. It makes sense for a genius inventor to have a mansion full of mechanical conundrums. The puzzles have a lot of variety in their construction, too. Best of all, there’s a hint system for those (like me) who lack a certain amount of patience, skill and the ability to think laterally.

As a flatscreen port of a remake of a classic, The 7th Guest is a couple of generations removed from the original, which is still playable in some form. As innovative and important as it was in 1993, however, the original game is undeniably dated. When it appeared in 2023, the VR remake was hailed as a respectful and engaging re-imagining of a fan favorite. The flatscreen version makes this excellent puzzle game accessible to those without a VR headset.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***